Racism

I was invited, along with several other American professors, to deliver lectures at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1979. Pieter Willem Botha was the prime minister, and apartheid, though becoming a bit relaxed, was the law of the land. Under apartheid, intermarriage between blacks, coloureds and Indians on the one hand and whites was prohibited.

DJ Khaled hosted the BET Hip Hop Awards, which were recorded September 17, 2016, and aired on that network Tuesday night. He remarked the show would be about “real lyricists, talking about real issues.” As you might guess, the real issues were all about the election and Black Lives Matter narrative.

In Netflix’s Original Series Luke Cage, Marvel Televisions and ABC Studios have introduced the first mainstream black superhero who is a hoodie-wearing avenger for social justice in Harlem. The thirteen episode series is peppered with racial issues. The tone is set in the very first episode when a handout to pedestrians reads: “Stay Harlem. Stay Black.” Along the way, biblical quotes are used to…

At the Associated Press Monday afternoon, Jim Suhr reported on the dismissal of a "civil rights lawsuit that alleged police used excessive force against protesters in Ferguson (Missouri) after the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown." The plaintiffs sought over $40 million from police, police officials, St. Louis County and the city of Ferguson. Predictably, the plaintiffs will appeal.…

NBC’s Timeless aired its pilot episode Monday night and proved that history can be changed but the topic of racism will never stop being exploited on television.

The press is going to extraordinary lengths to minimize the visibility of Hillary Clinton's damaging and disparaging February remarks at a fundraiser about how Bernie Sanders' supporters "are living in their parents’ basement," and how half of them don't know what ('just like Scandinavia') means" — stereotyping digs which don't survive even the most rudimentary efforts at fact-checking.

For the second day in a row, the New York Times hailed a Communist and Fidel Castro supporter on the front of its Arts page. On Friday, it was former Communist Party vice presidential candidate Angela Davis who got red-carpet treatment. On Saturday, the Times senior staff editor for culture Tamara Best conducted a fulsome interview with 89-year-old entertainer Harry Belafonte, “Old Warrior Takes…

On Thursday, in a story which made the front page of Friday's print edition, Jonathan Martin at The New York Times reported that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is "effectively acknowledging how difficult they think it will be to defeat Donald J. Trump" in Ohio.

The front of Friday’s New York Times Arts section featured the paper’s politically correct movie critic Manohla Dargis, “From Shackles to Prison Bars,” a review of activist filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s documentary “13TH.” It’s no surprise that left-wing Black Lives Matter propaganda moved her to tears: Dargis is preoccupied with race, valuing racial bean-counting in movies over artistic excellence…

After giving a substantial amount of attention to the case of Keith Lamont Scott being shot and killed by Charlotte police, with his wife disputing police accounts that he was holding a gun when he was shot, CNN this week has barely touched the important revelations that Scott not only was a convicted felon who had a history of gun violence, but that his wife even filed a protective order last…

After revelations that Keith Lamont Scott not only spent time in prison for shooting someone, but that he was also accused by his wife last year of violent behavior and of threatening her and her son with a gun, the networks have mostly been silent on the developments that would help discredit accusations that the police planted a gun on Scott after shooting him. Out of the morning and evening…

The first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is in the books, and the front page of the New York Times registered an amazingly slanted front-page “news analysis” by Michael Barbaro and Matt Flegenheimer. They sternly rebuked Trump for daring to suggest Hillary Clinton had once been insensitive about race: "No amount of practice, it seemed, could fully prepare her -- or…

In the least surprising development of the 2016 presidential campaign, the New York Times on Sunday endorsed “Hillary Clinton for President.” The last Republican the Times endorsed was Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. What wasn’t as expected was a follow-up anti-endorsement of Donald Trump, “the worst nominee put forward by a major party in modern American history.” The NYT bravely tried to make a…

The Root’s Michael Harriot has a problem with the phrase, “Not all cops are bad cops,” and insists, “This is not a pronouncement wrapped in hyperbole.” On September 21, Harriot suggested, “Maybe there are no good cops.” He then went on to say, “It is as obvious as sunshine at day and darkness at night. It is founded on the simple reasoning of human nature, legal precedent, and commonsense logic.”